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Eventually, he bought out the British shareholders,to run the business with another partner. Hedistinguished himself at a tender age by supplyingthe first consignment of Ceylon Tea direct to thethen USSR. Fast-forward a few decades and in1962, while still in his twenties, he establishedMerrill J. Fernando & Co., an entity that becameone of the top-ten bulk tea exporters in Ceylon.

Fernando’s dream was not to sell tea in bulk. Ittook him 38 years from the time he originallyconceived the idea as a young trainee tea taster inMincing Lane. In 1988, his brand was launched inAustralia. Shortly thereafter, Dilmah wasintroduced to New Zealand.

The brand was named after his two sons,Dilhan and Malik, and it was picked and packed,garden fresh and unblended, where it was grown,in Sri Lanka. As consumers accepted his tea andwelcomed the return of Ceylon Tea tosupermarket shelves, Dilmah’s founder becamethe spokesperson for the brand, appearing intelevision commercials and on the product’spackaging. His message was simple. I am a teagrower, I bring you my tea garden fresh,unblended, with a guarantee that it is the finest.He signed every pack and included a letter, andthat tradition continues to this day.Today, thebrand is marketed in over 90 countries aroundthe world.

ProductTea is the second most consumed beverage onEarth, after water. It has a heritage of 5,000 years,having begun as a medicine and only thenbecoming a beverage. Dilmah understands thisand therefore pioneered the concepts ofunblended tea, garden fresh and packed at origin.The range of teas offered by Dilmah share thisheritage of quality, its founder’s guarantee, andextends to a wide and varied range including aPremium selection, for everyday enjoyment, aGourmet Tea selection, Special Green Teas andExotic Teas. Dilmah launched its Watte (meaninggarden) boutique teas in 2003, representing thefinest Single Region Teas from Ceylon’s fourpremier tea-growing regions. In capturing theessence of these regions in four distinctivelydifferent teas, Dilmah drew parallels between teaand wine, taking Watte and fine Ceylon Tea to anew dimension.Watte Single Estate Tea waslaunched in 2006, extending the significance of thisinnovative line.

In designing its extensive range, Dilmahacknowledges consumers’ growing awareness oftea, and their growing preference for teas that areunique and different, whilst offering authenticityand quality.The t-Series joined Watte, in theBoutique Tea segment, as the brand offering teawith style to a younger generation of tea drinkers.

Dilmah was the first international brand tolaunch a genuine White Tea, which made its debutin Coles Supermarkets in Australia, redefining asegment that was commoditised by the samemultinationals that commoditised tea generally.Dilmah genuine White Tea launched at Aus$11.49 for ten teabags, more than a dollar per bag,competing successfully against vastly inferiorblends with little or no white tea, which sold at 99cents to Aus$ 3.99. Consumers recognised thedifference.

Recent DevelopmentsIn addition to White Tea, Dilmah’s new teasfeature three naturally spiced green teas – greentea with cinnamon, green tea with ginger, greentea with cardamom, two green teas enhancedwith herbs, green tea with camomile and greentea with lemongrass.The range is all-natural,combining green tea with natural spices or herbs.The tastes offered in this range provide a newdirection to the green-tea segment, the objectivebeing to keep green tea natural.

Dilmah’s strategic direction remains unchangedsince its inception – quality tea, delivered gardenfresh, with authenticity and ethics. Dilmah Tea isoffered on board almost 20 international airlines,including Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Etihad,Qantas and LOT Polish Airlines.The company’s t-Bars, offering tea with style and substance in acocktail bar of teas, offer tea to youngerconsumers in Holland, Poland, Italy and Thailand.

PromotionDilmah is the sponsor of Sri Lanka’s cricket team,both domestically and internationally.The DilmahCricket Network celebrates Sri Lankan cricketwith real-time updates of match scores, team andplayer statistics, and features on cricket from someof the world’s leading commentators.

In its commitment to the upliftment of theailing Ceylon Tea industry, Dilmah launched TheHistory of Ceylon Tea as an industry service

project, one of the largest single-categoryinformation websites in the world. It is an ongoingproject that has assembled an archive of over50,000 pages of literature relating to the heritageand history of Ceylon Tea, and offers this online asa resource for researchers, stakeholders andconsumers.The objective is to grow awareness ofthe effort and expertise that goes into producingthe finest tea, in order to benefit the industry.

Brand ValuesFernando pioneered the concept of tea picked,packed and branded at origin, right where it isgrown: Single Origin Tea.Value addition at thesource gives the Dilmah brand a unique strength,reaching the consumer direct and eliminating theneed for traders and their profit. Dilmah believesthat innovation in tea will influence the long-termsustainability of the entire tea industry, not just thesustainability of the Dilmah brand.

The company has consistently incorporatedsocial justice (or ethics) into its business model,on the assertion that business is a matter ofhuman service.The MJF Foundation evidences andsupports this assertion. In re-enacting thetraditional model of a farmer bringing his produceto market, directly and with a commitment to itsquality, Dilmah represents the fairest trade. Itsfounder believes that if every tea producer hadthe same opportunity to bring his product to themarket direct as well as for their countries,industries and workers to benefit from the addedmargin, this would be much fairer than Fairtrade.

www.dilmahtea.com

MarketIn a category dominated by multinationalcorporations, Dilmah has achieved success againstthe odds.With the evolution of the tea marketfrom its origins as one populated by a plethora ofsmall and medium-sized, mainly family-owned,businesses, to one controlled by less than fivetransnational corporations, the nature of tea haschanged. Dilmah battled against thecommoditisation that came with multinationalcontrol of tea, and although this family companywent against the flow, it has successfully createdfor its brand a quality niche.

For a bulk-tea supplier to move into brandedtea was quite a risk. Indeed, it was a move thatwas discouraged by a marketplace dominated bymultinationals.Those bulk-tea customers expectedSri Lanka to remain a raw-material supplier toEurope, the US, Australia and New Zealand.Theyhad their reasons.Their businesses were based onthe existence of multiple sources of the rawmaterial at a low cost, and the branding thereof.According to this model, tea was a commoditylike sugar, oil or grain.The smaller companies thatmade tea famous did so on the basis ofauthenticity and clear statement of origin, notablyCeylon Tea. However, the large corporations thatbought them over abandoned their heritage andomitted references to origin, in order to reducecosts, by changing the content of their newlyacquired brands to multi-origin blends.

Merrill J. Fernando had a very different visionfor tea and the tea drinker. He wanted to bringquality, authenticity and ethics back to tea. Freshtea is richer in antioxidants and so, he wanted tooffer his consumers tea that was garden fresh,picked and packed at origin. He believed thatconsumers had a right to know exactly what theywere drinking and so, he pioneered the conceptof Single Origin, unblended, tea. Naturally, themultinationals thought differently, since theirinterests lay in sourcing the product from multipleorigins, to buy at the lowest price, regardless ofquality. Dilmah challenged this notion andexplained the reasons to tea drinkers. In the

process, the brand created a segment of the teamarket that was driven not by price, but byquality.

AchievementsDilmah is one of the eight global brands in theMedinge Group’s 2005 Top Brands with aConscience. Medinge is a high-level internationalthink tank on branding and business. McDonald’sRestaurants possess two co-branded products.One is Coca-Cola, the other is Dilmah. On everybag of McDonald’s tea in over 20 countries, aDilmah logo represents Ceylon Tea.Thisrelationship is strong because the company meetsand exceeds McDonald’s exacting qualitystandards.

Dilmah tea was founded on quality, but also onethics. In consuming markets, Dilmah supportscharities benefiting underprivileged children, theelderly and the differently able, including RonaldMcDonald houses and the Children’s Leukaemia& Cancer Research Foundation in Australia, theHospice Movement in New Zealand and variouscharities in Vietnam and Central Europe.

Most significantly, the founder of Dilmahestablished the MJF Charitable Foundation, a non-governmental organisation committed to fulfillingthe social obligations of his family’s companies.TheMJF Foundation is funded entirely by its settlor’spersonal wealth and from revenue from Dilmah.

In 2006, over 10,000 underprivileged people in SriLanka benefited from over 100 projects, whichseek to assist victims of the tsunami, thedifferently able, abused children and women, theelderly and retired workers. It provides for theeducation and health care of tea estate workers,and is building pre-schools and hospitals which arefree of charge for the poor.

The Foundation challenges conventional CSRpractice in asserting that business is a matter ofhuman service and therefore, that for everybusiness, social service or helping the poor is anact of justice, an obligation, and not an option oran act of charity.

HistoryThe company’s roots go back to a time whenDilmah’s founder, as a young man of twenty, wasselected to join the first batch of Ceylonese to betrained in tea tasting. Until then, the British, whosede facto colonialism was replaced by a form ofeconomic colonialism over Ceylon’s tea industry,perpetuated the myth that Ceylonese wereunsuitable to taste tea because they ate hotcurries.This was an element of the Westerncontrol of Ceylon’s most important produce.

Fernando was trained in London’s famousMincing Lane, in the 1950s. It was here that teawas bought and sold in a country that cultivatedoverseas, imported and consumed most of theworld’s tea. In London, the young apprenticelearned about tea. He also learned that this was adysfunctional trade.Tea, a finished product thatwas handpicked, and produced with care andexpertise in a traditional and time-honouredmanner in Ceylon, was benefiting middlemen inEurope while earnings for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka,were a pittance.That was when he decided thatone day, he would establish his own brand, pickedand packed at origin, benefiting Ceylon, its teaindustry and the million or so workers who madeCeylon Tea possible.

On his return, he joined A. F. Jones & Co., aBritish-owned and managed tea business.Within afew years, he became its Managing Director.

THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT

The Dilmah brand was coined by its founderfrom the first letters of the names of his twosons, Dilhan and Malik.

Dilmah pioneered the concept of tea pickedand packed at origin, and supplied direct toconsumers, to offer a guarantee of consistency,quality and authenticity. Dilmah built on thiswith the introduction of Single Region andSingle Estate Tea.

The company is Sri Lanka’s number onemanufacturer and exporter of teabags,accounting for over 21% of the country’s totalexports of tea in bags.

Merrill J. Fernando created the world’s firstgenuinely Ethical Tea.

Dilmah’s t-Series, launched in 2003, was the firstBoutique Tea to combine style with substance,offering an eclectic and esoteric collection of42 teas, including rare and extraordinaryseasonal teas.

Watte, from Dilmah, introduced to discerningtea drinkers the parallels between tea andwine, establishing the aspect of terroir in teawhere four regions – Ran Watte, Uda Watte,Meda Watte and Yata Watte – offer distinctivelydifferent teas.

Dilmah